Anil Pandey is a 27 year old boy living in Bangalore with his own flat and a 9 to 5 job that pays him 75,000 every month. Shreya Srivastav is a 27 year old dental surgeon running a clinic in Bangalore, which gets her about 60,000 to 70,000 every month.
The things that connect both these young people are:
- They were classmates in school.
- They are successful and independent
- They belong from respectful families in the middle class section of the hypocrite society.
- They are madly in love and want to marry.
What disconnects them:
- He is a Brahmin, she is a Kayastha.
This statement is enough for their families to nod their heads in disagreement when they ask for their blessings to get married. Just because their ancestors had different occupations, they cannot marry. Just because they took birth in families with different inheritance, they cannot marry. Just because their families have an orthodox view towards modernization, they cannot marry.
“How can you even think of marrying a Non-Kayastha boy?” Shouted Shreya’s mother in revolt of her daughter’s unbecoming step that would outcast them from the society.
“No Non-Brahmin blood will enter our family.” Stated Anil’s father, disgusted of his son’s ridiculous activities that would point fingers on their family’s purity by the so called “chaar log”.
Their children’s happiness does not matter. It does not matter that they will be compatible with each other for the rest of their lives. Love has no place. What matters is ‘the family respect’.
No one cares to think about breaking those old orthodox traditions which have been breaking many hearts since eternity. What harm will a ‘foreign blood’ bring? What kind of allegations will stain the family reputation if the son in law is well settled and is from another reputed family?
But our twenty first century parents have their own way to regain their lost honor. Outcast the young people from the family before the society outcasts them. If the lovers got lucky and somehow escaped and got married, then why was term ‘Honour Killing’ invented? They put their own children on the deathbed without a pinch of guilt or shame on their faces. They are thrown away from the family as if loving a person from another caste is a crime. Isn’t murder a greater crime? And moreover, they are tortured just because they did:
- Something that they wanted to do.
- Something that is allowed by the Constitution of India and is a right.
- Something that their parents detested.
Why trouble the young souls just because they did something that they wished and which was also supported by the law created by the same lawmakers that they chose. Gone are the days when the rules for present generation was defined by people from two generations ago who knew nothing of the present day. There’s a book called Constitution for a reason, to describe the rights and wrongs of this society, the ‘Chaar log’ have no business defining them for us.
Why shall the youngsters of today bear the outcomes of some vision-lacking rules that were created thousands of years ago?
Why do you kill your children’s wishes to guard your honor? Instead let’s just kill the premonitions of the so called ‘chaar log’ so that there can be freedom to not accept what is wrong, to disagree to the wrongs that have been stated as right by our ancestors.
Image Credit: ‘Lock For Life‘ by Anubhav Gaurav
